Your Perception and reality are created by your own self. You have created a little world where you create your own emotional reactions and choices that leads to positive or negative circumstances.
Then we have created a collective world where we agree or differ from one another. Perception is the method by which people take all the sensations they experience and interpret them in some meaningful fashion. Perception is something that can be quite subjective in nature.
Two individuals can look at the same stimuli but perceive something totally different, for example, Optical illusions.
Why does this happen? Is your perception, your reality? Yes, and no. Sometimes our realities can be different from the realities of others. When we perceive things our brain filters sensory information that we receive, through lenses that make sense to it.
This lens is influenced by our own subjective experiences and values. Thus it is completely possible that two people might receive the same sensory stimuli but may perceive different things.
Realizing and acknowledging this can help us build more empathy, accept differences and live more harmoniously with one another.
Differences in perception and differences in reality
Background and foreground: What we may choose to see as important in a particular situation may just be the background of someone else’s story. We are constantly choosing what we wish to pay our attention to, as do the surrounding others, and often we may not choose the same thing.
Do we see what others see? How often have you disagreed with a friend or family member about what color something is? We often have experiences where we may see or experience something slightly different to those around us. This is a small indication of just how varied the human experience can be. We all experience the world around us in a similar but unique way.
Illusions: Illusions are a great example of how our physical sense organs can be overridden by our brain. When we expect to see something a certain way, often our mind allows us to view it like that even if the physical sensation is different. Have you ever seen a drawing that looks 3 D, even though it is only 2-D? Illusions are a great way to experience how perception can be very different from reality.
Perceiving beyond our sense organs: Sometimes we may perceive or feel things that we may not be able to explain. Some of us call it a gut feeling, others may call it intuition or a sixth sense but either way we cannot deny that these feelings very much make up our realities.
Although most of us see and interact with the world in similar ways, we cannot deny that many times we differ in our perceptions. If our perceptions make up our realities, then we must accept that there can be multiple realities, each as true and as valid as our differences in perception.
The more we are able to accept other people’s realities the more harmoniously we can live together.
Check Kaldan workshop on Mindfulness living by visiting www.kaldandoma.com